Complete Works of Sherwood Anderson

by Sherwood Anderson

  At the waterworks engine house they had an engine with a wheel twice as high as your head. It whirled round and round, so fast you could hardly see the spokes. The engineer never said anything. If you went to the door and stood looking in he never looked at you. You never saw a man with so much grease on one pair of pants.

  Up the creek, at the place to which Tar had now come, there had been a house once but it had burned down. There was an old apple orchard, the trees all let go, so many little shoots growing out of the limbs you could hardly climb up. The orchard was on the side of a hill that led right down to the creek. Beside it was a corn field.

  Tar sat down by the creek at the edge of the corn field and the orchard. When he had been sitting there a long time a ground hog on the opposite bank of the creek came out of his hole, stood on his hind legs and looked at Tar.

  Tar did not move. It was a queer notion carrying that straw around inside his shirt. It tickled.

  He took it out and the ground hog disappeared into his hole. It was growing dusk now. Pretty soon he would have to go home. Sunday was a funny kind of a day, some people going to church, others staying at home.

  The ones that stayed at home dressed up anyway.

  Tar had been told it was God’s day. He gathered some dry leaves along the fence by the orchard and then went a little way into the corn. When corn is almost ripe there are always some outer leaves that have dried and withered.

  “Barren com makes bitter bread.” Tar heard Will Truesdale say that one day as he sat with the other men on the bench before Tom Whitehead’s stable. He wondered what it meant. It was poetry Will was quoting. It would be nice to be educated like Will but not a souse and to know all the words there are and what they mean. If you put words together in just a certain way they sound nice even though you don’t know what they mean. They go well together like some people. Afterwards you are walking along alone and you say the words to yourself, liking the sound they make.

  Nice sounds at night by an old orchard and a com field too, about the best sound you can hear. The crickets are going it and the frogs and the grasshoppers.

  Tar lit the little pile of leaves, dry corn leaves and straw. Then he put some sticks on. The leaves weren’t very dry. There wasn’t a big quick fire just a gentle one with white smoke. The smoke curled up through the branches of one of the old apple trees in the orchard, some man had planted, thinking he would make a home there by the creek. He had got tired or discouraged, Tar thought, and after his house burned had moved away. People were always leaving one place and moving to another.

  The smoke went lazily up, into the branches of the trees. When a little breeze came some of it was blown through the standing corn.

  People talked about God. There wasn’t anything very definite in Tar’s mind. Lots of times you do something — like carrying that straw from the threshing inside your shirt all afternoon (it tickling you) — and you don’t know why you do it.

  There is a lot to think about you never can really think about. If you talk about God to a boy he gets all mixed up. Once some of the kids were talking about death and Jim Moore said that when he died he wanted them to sing at his funeral a song called “Let’s Go to the Fair in an Automobile” and a big boy that was standing near laughed fit to kill.

  He didn’t have sense enough to know that Jim did not mean what he said. He meant he liked the sound. Maybe he heard someone sing that song who had a nice voice.

  A preacher who came to the Mooreheads’ house once and talked a lot about God and hell scared Tar and made Mary Moorehead mad. What’s the use getting all worked up?

  If you sit at the edge of a corn field and an orchard and you have a little fire and it is almost night and there is a corn field and the smoke goes up lazy and slow toward the sky and you look up....

  Tar waited until the fire had all burned out and then went home.

  It was dark when he got there. If your mother has any sense she knows enough to know that certain days are certain days. If you do what she doesn’t expect on such a day she never says a word.

  Tar’s mother said nothing. When he got home his father had gone away and so had John. Supper was over but his mother got him some. Margaret was talking with a neighbor girl in the back yard and Robert was just sitting around. The baby was asleep.

  What Tar did, after he had his supper, was just to sit on the front porch with his mother. She was sitting near and now and then touched him with her fingers. [He felt as though he had been going through some kind of a ceremony. It’s just because things in general are so good and all right, for the time being. They liked to make a fire and watch the smoke go up in Bible times. That was a long time ago. When you have a fire like that, all by yourself, and the smoke is going up, lazy that way, through the branches of old apple trees and in among corn that has grown up higher than your head and when you look up it is late evening and almost dark it’s a long ways up to the sky where the stars are, all right.]

  PART III

  CHAPTER XII

  SHE WAS AN old woman and lived on a farm near the town in which the Mooreheads lived. All country and small town people have seen such old women but no one knows much about them. Such an old woman comes into town driving an old worn-out horse or she comes afoot, carrying a basket. She may own a few hens and have eggs to sell. She brings them in a basket and takes them to a grocer. There she trades them in. She gets some salt pork and some beans. Then she gets a pound or two of sugar and some flour.

  Afterward she goes to the butcher and asks for some dog meat. She might spend ten or fifteen cents but when she does she asks for something. In Tar’s day the butchers gave liver to anyone who wanted to carry it away. In the Moorehead family they were always having it. [Once] one of Tar’s brothers got a whole cow’s liver out at the slaughter house near the fan-grounds. He came staggering home with it and afterwards the Mooreheads had it until they were sick of it. It never cost a cent. Tar hated the thought of it all the rest of his life.

  The old farm woman got her some liver and a soup bone. She never visited with anyone and as soon as she had got what she wanted lit out for home. It made quite a load for such an old body. No one gave her a lift. People drive right down a road and never notice such an old woman.

  The old woman used to come into town past the Moorehead house during the summer and fall when Tar was sick. She went home later carrying a heavy pack on her back. Two or three large gaunt-looking dogs followed at her heels.

  Well, she was nothing special. She was one of the sort hardly anyone knows but she got into Tar’s thoughts. Her name was Grimes and she lived, with her husband and son, in a small unpainted house on the bank of a small creek four miles from town.

  The husband and son were a tough pair. Although the son was but twenty-one he had already served a term in jail. It was whispered about that the woman’s husband stole horses and ran them off to some other county. Now and then, when a horse turned up missing, the man had also disappeared. No one ever caught him.

  Once later when Tar was loafing at Tom Whitehead’s barn the man came there and sat on the bench in front. Judge Blair and two or three other men were there but not one spoke to him. He sat for a few minutes and then got up and went away. When he was leaving he turned and stared at the men. There was a look of defiance in his eyes. “Well, I have tried to be friendly. You do not want to talk to me. It has always been so wherever I have gone in this town. If, someday, one of your fine horses turns up missing, well, then what?”

  He did not say anything actually. “I’d like to bust one of you on the jaw” was about what his eyes said. Tar remembered afterwards how the look in his eyes made the shivers run down his back.

  The man belonged to a family that had had money once. His father John Grimes had owned a sawmill when the country was new and had made money. Then he got to drinking and running after women. When he died there wasn’t much left.

  Jake Grimes blew in the rest. Pretty soon there wasn’t any more lumber to cut and
his land was nearly all gone.

  He had got his wife off a German farmer, where he went to work one June day in the wheat harvest. She was a young thing then and scared to death.

  You see the farmer was up to something with the girl who was what is called “a bound girl” — and his wife had her suspicions. She took it out on the girl when the man wasn’t around. Then, when the wife had to go off to town for supplies, the farmer got after her. She told young Jake that nothing really ever happened but he did not know whether to believe her or not.

  He got her pretty easy himself, the first time he was out with her. Well, he wouldn’t have married her if the German farmer hadn’t tried to tell him where to get off. Jake got her to go riding with him in his buggy one night, when he was threshing on the place, and then he came for her the next Sunday night.

  She managed to get out of the house without her employer’s seeing her and then, when she was getting into the buggy, he showed up. It was almost dark and he just popped up suddenly at the horse’s head. He grabbed the horse by the bridle and Jake got out his buggy whip.

  They had it out right there. The German was a tough one. Maybe he didn’t care whether his wife knew or not. Jake hit him over the face and shoulders with the buggy whip but the horse got to acting up and he had to climb out.

  Then the two men went for it. The girl didn’t see it. The horse started to run away and went nearly a mile down the road before the girl got him stopped. Then she [managed] to tie him to a tree beside the road. Tar later knew all about it. It must have stuck in his mind from small town tales, heard when he loitered about where men talked. Jake found her after he got through with the German. She was huddled up in the buggy seat, crying, scared to death. She told Jake a lot of stuff, how the German had tried to get her, how he chased her once in the barn, how another time, when they happened to be alone in the house together, he tore her dress open clear down the front. The German, she said, might have got her that time if he hadn’t heard his old woman drive in at the gate. The wife had been off to town for supplies. Well, she would be putting the horse in the barn. The German managed to sneak off to the fields without her seeing. He told the girl he would kill her if she told. What could she do? She told a lie about ripping her dress in the bam when she was feeding the stock. She was a bound girl and didn’t know who or where her father and mother were. Maybe she did not have any father. The reader will understand.

  She married Jake and had a son and a daughter by him but the daughter died young.

  Then the woman settled down to feed stock. That was her job. At the German’s place she had cooked the food for the German and his wife. The German’s wife was a strong woman with big hips and worked most of the time in the fields with her husband. [The girl] fed them and fed the cows in the barn, fed the pigs, the horses and the chickens. Every moment of every day as a young girl was spent feeding something.

  Then she married Jake Grimes and he had to be fed. She was a slight thing and when she had been married for three or four years, and after the two children were born, her slender shoulders became stooped.

  Jake always had a lot’ of big dogs around the house that stood near the unused old sawmill near the creek. He was always trading horses when he wasn’t stealing something and had a lot of poor bony ones about. Also he kept three or four pigs and a cow. They were all pastured in the few acres left of the Grimes place and Jake did little or nothing.

  He went into debt for a threshing outfit and ran that for several years but it did not pay. People would not trust him. They were afraid he would steal the grain at night. He had to go a long way off to get work and it cost too much to get there. In the winter he hunted and cut a little firewood, to be sold in some nearby town. When his boy grew up he was just like his father. They got drunk together. If there wasn’t anything to eat in the house when they came home the old man gave his old woman a [clip] over the head. She had a few chickens of her own and had to kill one of them in a hurry. When they were all killed she would not have any eggs to sell when she went to town and then what would she do?

  She had to scheme all her life about getting things fed, getting the pigs fed so they would grow fat and could be butchered in the fall. When they were butchered her husband took most of the meat off to town and sold it. If he did not do it first the boy did it. They fought sometimes and when they fought the old woman stood aside trembling.

  She had got the habit of silence anyway — that was fixed.

  Sometimes, when she began to look old — she wasn’t forty yet — and when the husband and son were both gone off, trading horses, or drinking or hunting or stealing, she went around the house and the bam yard muttering to herself.

  How was she going to get everything fed — that was her problem. The dogs had to be fed. There wasn’t enough hay in the barn for the horses and the cow. If she did not feed the chickens how could they lay eggs? Without eggs to sell how could she get things in town, things she had to have to keep the place going? Thank Heavens she did not have to feed her husband — in a certain way. That hadn’t lasted long after their marriage and after the babies came. Where he went on his long trips she did not know. Sometimes he was gone from home for weeks at a time and after the boy grew up they went off together.

  They left everything at home for her to manage and she had no money. She knew no one. No one ever talked to her. When it was winter she had to gather sticks of wood for her fire, had to try to manage to keep the stock fed with very little grain, very little hay.

  The stock in the barn cried to her hungrily, the dogs followed her about. In the winter the hens laid few enough eggs. They huddled in corners of the barn and she kept watching them. If a hen lays an egg in the barn in the winter and you do not find it, it freezes and breaks.

  One day in the winter the old woman went off to town with a few eggs and the dogs followed her. She didn’t get started until nearly three o’clock and the snow was heavy. She hadn’t been feeling very well for several days and so she went muttering along, scantily clad, her shoulders stooped. She had an old grain bag in which she carried her eggs, tucked away down in the bottom. There weren’t many of them but in the winter the price of eggs is up. She would get a little meat [in exchange for the eggs], some salt pork, a little sugar, and coffee perhaps. It might be the butcher would give her a piece of liver.

  When she had got to town and was trading in the eggs the dogs lay by the door outside. She did pretty well, got the things she needed, more than she had hoped. Then she went to the butcher and he gave her some liver and some dog meat.

  It was the first time anyone had spoken to her in a friendly way for a long time. The butcher was alone in his shop when she went in and was annoyed by the thought of such a sick-looking old woman out on such a day. It was bitter cold and the snow, that had let up during the afternoon, was falling again. The butcher said something about her husband and her son, swore at them, and the old woman stared at him, a look of mild surprise in her eyes. He said that if either the husband or the son was going to get any of the liver or the heavy bones with scraps of meat hanging to them, he had put into the grain bag, he’d see [him] starve first.

  Starve, eh? Well, things had to be fed. Men had to be fed, and horses that aren’t any good but maybe can be traded off, and a poor thin cow that hadn’t given any milk for three months.

  Horses, cows, pigs, dogs, men.

  The old woman had to get back home before darkness came if she could. The dogs followed at her heels, sniffing at the heavy grain bag she had fastened on her back. When she got to the edge of town she stopped by a fence and tied the bag [on]to her back with a piece of rope she had carried in her dress pocket for just that purpose. That was an easier way to carry it. Her arms ached. It was hard when she had to crawl over fences and once she fell over and landed in the snow. The dogs went frisking about. She had to struggle to get to her feet again but she made it. The point of climbing over the fences was that there was a short cut over a hill and through a wood
. She might have gone around by the road but it was a mile farther that way. She was afraid she couldn’t make it. And then besides the stock had to be fed. There was a little hay left, a little corn. Perhaps her husband and son would bring some home when they came. They had driven off in the only buggy the Grimes family had, a rickety thing, a rickety horse hitched to the buggy, two other rickety horses led by halters. They were going to trade horses, get a little money if they could. They might come home drunk. It would be well to have something in the house when they got back.

  The son had an affair on with a woman at the county seat, fifteen miles away. She was a bad woman, a tough one. Once, in the summer, the son had brought her to the house. Both she and the son had been drinking. Jake Grimes was away and the son and his woman ordered the old woman about like a servant. She did not mind much, was used to it. Whatever happened she never said anything. That was her way of getting along. She had managed that way when she was a young girl at the German’s and ever since she had married Jake. That time her son brought his woman to the house they stayed all night, sleeping together just as though they were married. It hadn’t shocked the old woman, not much. She had got past being shocked early in life.